The salmon’s tail slaps the deck one last time before it turns into money.

Ihander has been
doing this work since he was 12. He’s one of the last of his kind, an
Oregon gillnetter. For generations, gillnetters have been working in the
same way: small boats laying thousands of feet of net in Northwest
rivers, then plucking out their harvest, one fish at a time.

Only
about 200 gillnetters still work in Oregon, sending fish to local
canneries and the white china of Portland’s best restaurants. Their take
represents a tiny slice of the fish killed every year by sport
fishermen, sea lions and the Columbia River dams.

But
this livelihood is being targeted for extinction by an unusual coalition
of conservation groups, wealthy sport fishermen and businesses that
cater to them. They call gillnetting an antiquated and inhumane practice
that kills indiscriminately and causes gruesome deaths for aquatic
birds and marine mammals.

“Anything and
everything that swims into them are ensnarled,” says David Schamp,
director of the 10,000-member Coastal Conservation Association of
Oregon, one of the groups supporting the ban. “We believe a high
percentage of whatever is captured perishes—and we don’t believe that’s a
good thing.”

Proponents
have so far offered little in the way of quantifiable evidence to make
their case, and they’ve been unable for years to persuade lawmakers to
ban gillnetting.

So they are pushing
for a ballot measure this fall. Bankrolled by a political committee
called Stop Gillnetting Now, backers have collected more than 92,000
signatures. They need 87,000 valid ones by July 6 to qualify for the
November ballot.

The campaign has made
for some odd alliances: Environmentalists are holding hands with one
wealthy backer, Loren Parks, the conservative millionaire who financed
many anti-tax campaigns and for years paid the bills for initiative
activist Bill Sizemore. Parks put $20,000 of seed money into the
initiative petition. Another wealthy sport fisherman, Norman L. Brenden
of Olympia, Wash., has become Oregon’s biggest political donor, pouring
$505,000 into the campaign war chest.

Gillnetters fear they
will be unable to afford a campaign to fight back, and that voters will
be swayed by misinformation and hyperbole.

“It ain’t saving one
fish,” says Jim Wells, a commercial fisherman and president of Salmon
for All, which represents the gillnetters. “This is not about
conservation, it’s about allocation. It’s a sham.”

The measure is the latest round in an old battle of who gets to catch the fish, and who gets the money for them.

Sportfishing in
Oregon is a $30 million-a-year industry, according to a 2009 Oregon
Department of Fish and Wildlife study. Its rival industry, commercial
fishing, produced $284 million in income in the state last year, an ODFW
study shows. Of that, commercial ocean and river salmon accounted for
$6.7 million, and gillnetting specifically for about $5 million.

“I’ve always looked
at it as two kids playing on the railroad track, with the locomotive
bearing down on them,” says John North, the state Department of Fish and
Wildlife’s Columbia River fisheries manager, of both sides in the
fight. “They’re too busy throwing rocks at each other to notice the
bigger problem.”

That is, too few fish for too many people.

If the measure makes
the ballot, the fight will force voters to endure grisly photos of
marine life injured by nets—a PR barrage the fishermen hint they might
counter with cameos from their grizzled friends on the Discovery
Channel’s hit show Deadliest Catch.

The fight is about
more than a struggle for the millions of dollars these salmon represent
to the sportfishing industry and some tough-talking fourth-generation
fishermen.

Instead,
the fight is over what kind of place Oregon is, and how its people will
make a living. It’s about the state’s shift away from the historical
resource-extraction economy and toward the service sector, and the
steady disappearance of an endangered species: Oregon’s blue-collar
middle class, a people who could live comfortably from the land without
necessarily going into debt for a college degree.

SLOW RIDE: Gillnetter Mark Ihander fishes Youngs Bay, which he remembers from his youth as a slow-and-easy training ground for the next generation of fishermen. Today, a dwindling number of aging fishermen supplement their incomes here.

IMAGE: Corey Pein

The salmon on your plate might have come from the ocean,
scooped up by a trawler with tens of thousands of other sea creatures.
It might have been a wild fish caught on a hook in Canada. It might have
come from a “farm”—a cramped underwater cage where fish feed on pellets
and swim in circles until fat enough for market.

Or it might have been caught by a gillnetter like Mark Ihander.

At
mid-afternoon on a recent Wednesday, Ihander, 60, launches his nameless
22-foot boat from a private wooden pier at Astoria’s Tide Point
Restaurant on the Nehalem Highway. The boat putters loudly away on the
power of its 350-horsepower outboard into the bay, fed by the Youngs
River. He’s just upstream from the tall, narrow old Warrenton-Astoria
Highway bridge; the Astor Column looms to the north. Two bald eagles
glide low overhead.

The baywaters are
shallow and muddy, a so-called “select area” set aside for fishermen by
the state and stocked each year with tens of thousands of hatchery
salmon subsidized by hydroelectric ratepayers.

Ihander started work at 5 am, making four drifts across the bay. He caught one fish all morning.

The afternoon looks to be better.

Critics are correct that gillnetting is antiquated. Its practitioners prefer to call it traditional.

If the gillnetters
seem preoccupied with heritage—who is of Norwegian stock, who is Finnish
or Italian or Irish, and who is fresh off the boat—that’s because they
have spent years dragging the same kind of nets around the same waters
as their ancestors.

Ihander may have been born in Astoria, but he is Finnish first.

“My grandfather,” he says, “went 55 years without power, on the sea.”

SEINE IT AIN’T SO: Purse seine nets like this one in Washington were banned in Oregon decades ago. The proposed ballot measure would make them legal again.

IMAGE: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

White fishermen took
up gillnetting in the mid-1800s, according to old newspaper accounts and
several histories of Oregon fishing. Pacific Northwest native tribes
also historically used several types of fishing nets, including some
like gill nets.

Today, gill nets are
more or less the only permitted commercial fishing apparatus on the
Columbia River. Many other types of gear were eventually outlawed: fish
traps, fish wheels and seine nets, which work like a funnel.

Gill nets are so
called because they’re designed to snag fish by the gills. Most other
states ban gill nets. Oregon strictly regulates their design and
deployment.

The boats themselves
can be spotted by the large spools, called drums, on their decks. Wound
tight and thick around the center of the spool is a pale bluish-white
wad of net.

The
weave of the mesh, hypnotically complex, stretches between a dark, heavy
lead line, which sinks to the bottom, and a bright blue cork line,
which with the help of those small white floats the shape of a Nerf
football, stays near the water’s surface. The gauge of this mesh is 7
inches, sized for spring chinook.

Ihander’s boat has
one steering wheel inside the cabin and another full of controls outside
the cabin, on the starboard side near the spool. This allows Ihander to
work the net and pilot the boat at the same time, without help from a
crew.

Wedged between the net and the bulwark, he sets the boat into reverse, and the spool begins to unwind.

With his left hand on
the wheel, he guides the boat backward across the bay. With his right,
he tugs now and again at the cork line to keep it on track and to
straighten any tangles in the mesh before it vanishes under the water.
He will lay 750 feet of net into Youngs Bay—less than half of the legal
length.

The spool turns quickly, and every second, another white float slides onto the water.

“The thing about
being in such a small, tight boat like this,” he shouts over the noise
of the motor, “you’ve got to be careful when you’re laying the net out.
More than once a guy has gotten his feet jerked out from under him.”

Ihander doesn’t wear a life jacket, at least not here in Youngs Bay.

And he usually works alone, even in Alaska. Surprisingly agile, he moves carefully but confidently around the net drum.

Caution is warranted.
This work can kill. Many years ago, five of Ihander’s good friends—then
young men seeking their fortune in the Alaska waters—drowned, their
bodies never recovered, on a fishing expedition he was invited on. Last
year, his father slipped and hit his head while fishing; he died before
Ihander’s brother could get him to the hospital.

Ihander holds up his
left hand and clenches it. The ring finger doesn’t bend like the others.
An accident on the bulwark once severed the finger. His crewmates put
it on ice like a caught fish, and the finger was later reattached.

He’s been through worse on land.

Eight years ago,
Ihander was diagnosed with lung cancer. He credits his recovery to many
gallons of green tea and two rounds of chemotherapy at OHSU arranged by
his wife. While most chemo patients lose a lot of weight, Ihlander says
he gained 40 pounds during treatment, improving his odds of survival. He
says whenever he began to vomit, he just swallowed it. And so
fishing—all the decades spent around fish guts and grievous
wounds—helped save his life, by making him less squeamish. “I mean,
we’ve had to stitch ourselves up, for chrissakes,” he says. “There’s
nobody to help you.”

Ihander stops. “There’s a fish!” he says. “I heard a snap. That meant he broke a mesh.”

He sounds as excited as if he’d never seen one before.

NET EFFECT: Gillnetter Mark Ihander reels in the gill net on his second “drift” of the afternoon in Youngs Bay at Astoria. The fishermen take turns laying their nets. “It’s not all helter-skelter,” Ihander says.

IMAGE: Corey Pein

Last spring, state figures show, the gillnetters took a
combined 11,000 chinook salmon from set-aside, hatchery-stocked areas
like Youngs Bay. In all inland waters and seasons last year, they caught
95,015 chinook.

That’s a fairly small
share of the overall salmon catch. Tribes are entitled to half of the
overall allowable harvest. Sport fisherman take most of the rest.
According to ODFW figures, since 2000 in the Columbia River and its
tributaries, sport fishermen took 82 percent of the reported salmon, not
counting the tribal share.

Gillnetters
take a share of what’s left, but the proposed ballot measure would make
the practice illegal, and outlaw the sale of fish caught by gill net in
Oregon. (Tribal fisherman could still use them and sell the fish,
though most of their catch is consumed ceremonially.)

Supporters of the
ballot measure say there are several reasons to outlaw gill
nets—including the fact many states have already done so. (Gill nets are
legal across the Columbia in Washington but were banned in California
coastal waters by a 1990 proposition that provided compensation to
displaced fishermen.)

Advocates say gill
nets cause a high mortality rate for fish that manage to escape from the
mesh, and produce a high amount of “bycatch”—nontargeted
species—compared to other, more selective forms of fishing.

“It’s about moving
the industry forward, not eliminating it,” says Jeremy Wright of Wright
Communications and Public Affairs, which has advised the
anti-gillnetting campaign.

They
also say the nets cause the salmon to suffer. They produce pictures of
fish with the scales and skin around their heads peeled off, raw and
pink flesh showing through their heads. Other photos show salmon with
torn gills, and seals with deep, bleeding wounds around their necks from
the nets.

And they say other sea life—birds and seals, for example, get caught in the nets.

Anti-gillnetting
campaigners say the proof for all this is in the photos—which is
problematic. The campaign shared several images with WW that show
abandoned nets, injured salmon and seals, and it claimed all were taken
within the past couple of years on the Columbia River. But when pressed
for details, the campaign changed that story—a third of the photos are
years old, and one was outside Oregon. And the campaign hasn’t been able
to say when and where the photos of seals were taken.

However, studies
specifically comparing gill nets and seine nets on Columbia River salmon
are limited and incomplete. The distinction is important, because the
results can be dramatically affected by mesh-net size and type, water
temperature, depth and speed, other unique geographic factors and the
species involved.

The
measure would allow fishermen to use a different kind of net, called a
purse seine that hangs like a basket underwater, then tightens around
the fish before hauling them by crane into a boat. Ironically, Oregon
voters approved a ban on purse seine nets in 1948, a measure supported
by gillnetters.

“They were probably
pitching the same arguments back then, that the seine was too
effective,” says North, the ODFW Columbia River fisheries manager. “It
probably came down to money like everything else…. It’s not that
different from what’s going on now.”

Backers say gill nets
end up injuring—and killing—too many fish that escape. They say studies
show gill nets have a mortality rate of 80 percent or higher, up to 100
percent. “The science is clear,” says Eric Stachon, spokesman for Stop
Gillnetting Now.

BAD CATCH: Voters can expect to see more photos like this in the coming months. Anti-gillnet campaigners say this June 2008 photo shows net damage to a Columbia River chinook salmon.

Image courtesy of Stop Gillnetting Now

But
the science is not clear. Studies suggest the mortality rate for purse
seine nets, which the ballot measure would allow, may be lower—anywhere
from 50 percent to 100 percent. But the bycatch may also be higher.

“By
my experience, if you’re handling 10 sockeye in a gill net, you might
kill five,” North says. “But if you lay out a seine and you catch 100,
and the mortality rate is 5 percent, you still kill the same number of
fish.”

The measure is
potentially a local boon to the national $45 billion sportfishing
industry, which includes guides, charters and, most of all, companies
that make and sell gear. An influential voice among the backers is
former ODFW fisheries chief Jim Martin, who now works for Pure Fishing, a
major sport-tackle manufacturer owned by Jarden Corp.

Another ban booster,
the founding chairman of the Coastal Conservation Association’s Pacific
Northwest affiliates, Gary Loomis, was a pioneer in the development of
graphite fishing rods.

The gillnetters feel the focus on their methods at the exclusion of others is unfair.

For
instance, federal figures show that anglers’ discarded hooks kill dozens
of sea lions each year in Oregon, California and Washington.
Hydroelectric dams kill many more.

The gillnetters treat their role as villains with bitter irony and dark humor.

STILL FLOPPIN’: This 4-foot sturgeon wound up in Ihander’s net. He let it go because it was oversized and probably ready to spawn.

IMAGE: Corey Pein

As the blue-sky sun warms the air, Ihander starts his
boat’s motor to reel in his second drift of the afternoon. The first
catch is a monster—a white sturgeon, more than 4 feet long and heavy as a
sandbag.

Ihander hefts it over
the bow and, for a moment, the great prehistoric fish seems to stand
upright—and either man or fish might go overboard.

He brings it down to the deck on its side, revealing its pale pink belly and strange cauliflower mouth.

From snout to tail,
the sturgeon is wrapped in the net. Ihander grabs a long, thin blade
like a steak knife, moves toward the still-struggling sturgeon and cuts
away the mesh near the fish’s eyes. Ihander bends, encircles the fish in
his arms, and heaves it over the port side.

Ihander notes how little injury the fish faced. Only the fish knows for sure.

“That’s
not like you’ve played him out in the fishing line for an hour,” he
says. “That one, he’d probably been in a net before, so he said, ‘I’ll
just wait here till he lets me out.’”

FRESH OFF THE BOAT: Ihander caught five fish on two drifts over about two hours—a fair day.

IMAGE: Corey Pein

The lack of economic escape for the gillnetters themselves
has them most worried. For younger fishermen—and there are, the state
estimates, about two dozen gillnetters in their 20s and 30s in Oregon,
out of perhaps 200 active permits—and future generations, the
alternatives may be dire.

What they fear most
is that their kids will spend their lives working as Wal-Mart
associates, or serving coffee to sport fishermen with shiny new boats.

Steve Fick, owner of Fishhawk Fisheries in Astoria, employs up to 25 seasonal workers, many of them young people.

“They make enough
money to go to school,” he says. “In turn, by going to college, they get
some options in their life. You’re not going to do that if you take
[gillnetting] away from us and you give another day or two a year to the
recreational fishery. You’re not going to pour enough coffees for those
people.”

It’s not really about the fish, as the gillnetters see it. It’s about Old Oregon vs. New Oregon.

Old Oregon is logging, fishing and hard living, every day.

New
Oregon is craft brewing, JavaScript coding and occasional nature
walks—or, at least, selling bait and tackle once a year to tourists who
can afford such things.

Campaigners favoring an end to gillnetting show little sympathy for the fishermen.

Read deeply enough
into the sport fishermen’s online forums, and the studies the industry
has commissioned, and one finds the blunt argument that the future has
no room for old methods.

One essay on the Oregon Anglers’ website says the government should “help train the commercial fishermen for a new occupation.”

“Before you get all
weepy-eyed for the poor commercial fishermen,” the essay says, “know
that their industry will not collapse if they cannot kill salmon.”

While the fishermen depend on one another, a regional economy depends on all of them.

“If they’re gone,
we’re done. It puts us and two employees out of work,” says Bob
Zakrzewski, co-owner of Columbia Pacific Marine Works at the Port of
Astoria, which repairs boat engines, among other things, for sport and
commercial fishermen alike.

Englund Marine and
Industrial, a nearby retailer, also caters to sport and commercial
fishermen from its headquarters shop at the port. The cavernous
warehouse in the back of the shop has a full wall of gillnet gear,
specially designed for the Columbia River and imported from Japan,

“Taking a handful of
jobs out of rural area, it has a bigger impact than in the metro area,”
says Kurt Englund, whose family has run the company for seven decades.
“In a small town like this, we can’t survive on tackle alone.”

At the muddy southern bank of the bay, Ihander draws the last of the gill net inside the boat.

His boat reaches the shore as two fish buyers are walking along the pier.

“Perfect
timing, guys,” Ihander says as he pilots his boat in. He raises the
plank that covers his catch, and the men on the pier lean over the boat
to inspect the afternoon take.

“Beautiful fish,” says one of the men.

They work quickly to
unload, grabbing salmon two at a time by the mouth. One of the buyers
lashes Ihander’s fish with a rope running through their mouths and
gills. The fish will go off to a processing plant. Ihander in return
gets a fish ticket, which he can redeem later for a check from the
processor. Duplicates of each receipt must be repeated to ODFW within 24
hours.